Sunday, April 10, 2011

Think Piece #8


             I have five students in my class who are identified and have special needs in the areas of reading, writing, and math.  There are also many other students who are not identified, but struggle with academics, in particular, writing.  When I teach writing, I guided the students through each step of the writing process.  Generally, as the year progresses, I would give the students more responsibility, but many of my students struggle with writing.  Some of the students have difficulty organizing their ideas while others struggle with presenting clear ideas and task initiation.  My students that are more capable when it comes to writing struggle with adding details to their writing and writing to their full potential. 
            I have a special education teacher that pushes into my classroom during writing workshop.  This is a great help because of the diverse needs of the students.  Having the special education teacher in the room allows me to move at a pace that is not too fast or too slow.  She is there to assist those students who need additional support.  Several of my students with special needs have difficulty brainstorming and thinking of seed ideas.  They have a difficult time narrowing down their ideas to a moment in time. 
            The majority of my students need support when it is time to revise writing pieces.  The students tell me that their piece is fine the way it is.  I give the students examples of new ideas to add to their writing pieces.  If many of the students struggle with this task, I will have the students partner up and share ideas with each other.  The students enjoy helping each other and have great ideas to share. 
            The editing process is a little more difficult because my students are all on very different levels.  My more advanced students have few or no punctuation, capitalization, or spelling errors, whereas, my struggling students have many.  For some writing pieces I will conference one-on-one with the students, but most of the time the students are responsible for editing their own writing pieces.  I have the students read through their piece and check for capitalization, punctuation, and spelling errors.  The students then raise their have and tell me any words they think they have spelled wrong.  I write the words on the board.  The students then independently correct the spelling in their writing. 
            For many writing pieces such as personal narratives, friendly letters, and thank you letters, I gave my students a template to help guide them in their writing.  These templates allowed my students to focus more on the content of the writing and less on the format.
            My students started this year on many different writing levels.  Each individual student requires a different level of writing support.  The students continue, to be at different levels of writing, yet they have all made major gains in writing this year.  Some of my students simply needed practice with task initiation while others needed assistance writing clear ideas in a well-organized manner.  I continue to differentiate my instruction in order to provide each student with individualized instruction in their areas of need.   

Sunday, April 3, 2011

Think Piece #7


As I was reading Gerald Campano’s book, Immigrant Students and Literacy: Reading, Writing, and Remembering, I felt compassion for these students.  I wanted to help them as Campano did.  He gave every student the opportunity to express themselves and their ethnic backgrounds.  I cannot imagine teaching in a classroom full of fifth graders that spoke fourteen different languages.  I feel like that would be very overwhelming, rewarding, but overwhelming.     
            One of the students Campano mentioned stated, “I want to be part of both cultures.”  It is important to help keep a students culture alive in all aspects of their life.  Teachers are the ones that need to help keep children’s cultures alive in the school setting.  For this child to want to keep “both cultures” alive is refreshing.  I love when students share about their cultures because I not only learn from them, but the other students do as well.  It gets the students interested in learning about new cultures. 
I do not have much experience working with English Language Learners, but I do have some.  I have subbed for an ESL teacher many times.  Before I subbed for her I worked across the hall from her for three moths.  Seeing the passion that this ESL teacher has when working with her students sometimes makes me want to become an ESL teacher.  This particular teacher is so passionate about her students.  She goes above and beyond what most teachers do.  She gives up her lunch to work with students and often even works with students during her planning time as well.  She makes sure that each every one of her students is receiving the support that they need to be successful. 
I had a second grade student in my class last year that was an ESL learner, but she did not require much support from the ESL teacher.  She spoke Spanish at home and English in school.  It amazes me that these young students are able to do that.  This particular student did very well in the classroom.  I also had a student whose family was from Macedonia.  My student was born here, but the rest of her family was born in Macedonia so she had unique experiences to share with the class.  I enjoyed having diversity in my classroom because my students could all bring different experience to the classroom.  This was especially beneficial during the writing of our class book.  During my second grade teacher position last year, I was filling in for a maternity leave.  For a writing piece, I convinced the students that their teacher was not home taking care of her baby, but that she was really traveling the world.  We did this because we were working on the skill fantasy or reality.  Each student chose a different place to write about.  My students from different countries were able to write about those places and add their personal experiences to their writing.  This was interesting for me to read and the other students loved it as well.  These students were so proud to be able to tell us about their culture. 
The last time I subbed for her, I worked with two Spanish students that were new to the U.S.  We worked on basic tasks such as labeling body parts like arms, legs, and head.  The students were very polite and attentive.  They had difficulty spelling some words.  I was helping them and realized part of the reason they were having so much difficulty.  Both of the students confused the letters “e” and “a.”  I took Spanish for six years in high school, so I have some knowledge of the language and customs.  In the Spanish alphabet, the letter “e” is pronounced like “a.”  Once I made this realization, I could better help the students.  It was something small, but it makes all the difference.  It is important for ESL teachers to have background knowledge about a student’s culture and language in order to help them succeed. 
Teachers need to keep in mind the different backgrounds students come from when planning instruction.  We are always taking into account different learning abilities,  but I feel that we so easily forget about ethnic diversity.  Embracing this diversity can bring so much to a classroom. 

Monday, March 28, 2011

Think Piece #6


Inventive spelling is an important stage of a child’s development.  In the primary grades, students need the opportunity to use inventive spelling in their writing.  There are many stages that students go through in the development of learning spelling and spelling patterns.  Each step is key and has different characteristics.  It is sometimes difficult to sit back and watch your students phonetically spell words and not correct them. 
Best Practices in Writing Instruction states, “Throughout much of U.S. educational history, spelling was a core element of literacy instruction.”  Just as with most of the curriculum there has been a shift.  In school, we used to be very spelling based.  We have shifted to focus more on teaching the skills of spelling and emphasize memorization of spelling words less.  When we drill spelling words, the students are simply memorizing.  Some students will remember how to spell the words down the road, but most do not.  We still give students spelling lists everything week and expect them to learn the words by the test on Friday.  The difference is that we focus more on the skill during the week rather than the rote memorization of the words.  Spelling can also be incorporated with vocabulary in the classroom.  On Monday I give my students a list of their spelling words and go over them. When I do this I also review the skill associated with all of the words.  I do not give my students spelling homework in which they write the words five times each or put them in a sentence.  I remember having to do this as a child.  I always just rushed through it to get it done and did not learn much.  In school I generally did well on spelling tests, but not everyone did.  I have seen many students become frustrated with spelling tests.  Although I do give spelling tests I do not devote too much time or emphasis on them.  During our Daily Five rotations students have the options of choosing the word work center where they can practice their spelling words in a hands on approach.  They can make their words using wikki sticks, play dough, or a white board.  They can also write a story using their spelling words or make a word search with their spelling words. 
As I was reading about sentence combining in both the article and the book, I realized how often my students do not do this.  Many of my students write short choppy sentences that all sound similar.  I try to help them understand that if you write your sentences all sound similar, the reader will become bored.  I write examples of my own in which most of the sentences have the same sentence structure and sound repetitive.  The students recognize that this is boring and the reader will loose interest in the writing piece.  The difficult part is trying to help the students incorporate skills such as sentence combining in their own writing to make it sound better.  During writing workshop this week I plan to work on sentence combining with my students and encouraging them to use it in their own writing.  I will start small and have students work on the skill in isolation.  Once they understand the concept, I will have them use it in their writing pieces. 

Sunday, March 20, 2011

Think Piece #5


 
            It is important to set a purpose for writing just as you do for reading.  Students need purpose and direction.  Best Practices in Writing Instruction states,

“In a world where student achievement if often gauged by the application of a pencil to a multiple-choice bubble, it is important to remember that writing is a performance task that requires substantial effort, motivation, persistence, strategic planning, and skill as well as knowledge about the topic.”

Our students live in a world full of testing.  As the book states, most testing is in the form of coloring in a circle for scan tron, multiple-choice questions.  Student can get by on those types of assessments without putting much effort in.  Writing assessments are very different.  The product is important, but so is the process students use to get to the final product.  Assessments should assess both of these pieces of the writing process.  To begin the writing process you need a clear purpose and audience.  The audience needs to be one students can relate to and write with a purpose.  When my second graders were working on persuasive writing, I made their audience their parents.  This is an audience in which the students know how to get their attention. The purpose for writing was to persuade their parents to change their bedtime to a later time.  The students of course loved writing about this were very interested in this topic. 
            Writing can be incorporated in all parts of the curriculum.  Writing can help you assess students not only in the writing process, but also in other subject areas.  It takes time for students to be able to clearly express their thoughts and ideas about content in their writing.  The writing process should be taught as a lesson in itself before it is used to communicate information.  Students need to understand the process in order to use it as a tool of successful communication.  All students are different, some may write a piece that is well-organized and grammatically correct but does not include the correct information while another student could write a poorly organized piece with all of the correct information.  It takes time to develop a well-organized writing piece for communication.              Teachers should use writing assessments to guide their writing instruction while testing is used to assess the actual writing.  There is stress placed on students in testing situations.  They have a limited time and receive no assistance.  Students need practice in these situations because they will encounter them both in and out of school.  Students need practice being put in these situations so they know how to approach them.  Much prep time in classrooms is spent not only on content prep for New York State Assessments, but also on how to take the test.  This is especially important for Special Education students.  State tests put so many writing demands on students that it will help put them at ease if they have a plan of how to take the test.   

Monday, February 21, 2011

Think Piece #4


            The success of student writing relies heavily on the teacher.  The teacher is responsible for motivating students to write and also to give them the resources needed to be successful.  These tools are not always the same for each individual student. 
As stated in Best Practices in Writing Instruction, “When students do not value writing or a specific writing task, they may exert as little effort as possible to complete it” (Graham, McArthur, & Fitzgerald, 2007).  I have seen many different styles of teaching writing.  The ones that I see to be most successful are the ones in which the students are given a purpose for writing and also choice.  One of the questions we often hear as teachers is, “Why do we have to do this?”  I know that I hear it quite frequently, mostly from my intermediate students rather than my primary students.  Students need to have a reason for why they are required to complete a specific task.  This will help them to be more successful.  If they are simply asked to write just to do it, they will be less likely to be motivated. 
Giving choice to students gives them an extra motivation to write.  There are times when you have to give students a specific topic to write about, but there are also times to let the students choose what they want to write about.  The teacher provides the students with the type of writing along with guidelines and the students choose the topic.  The class I worked with wrote a variety of writing pieces such as personal narratives, procedural writing, friendly letters, and persuasive essays.  The majority of the students truly enjoyed writing these pieces because they had the opportunity to write about topics that meant something to them or that they enjoyed.  Many of the boys have a strong interest in wrestling and always seem to find a way to work that into their writing.  They became passionate about their writing. 
One of my special education students just last week was writing a friendly letter to a pen pal from another school.  This student generally struggles with task imitation and needs teacher assistance to help him form his thoughts.  We wrote friendly letters earlier in the school year and he wrote them, but did not show the enthusiasm that he did when writing to a pen pal.  This practical application motivated him.  This particular student wrote a solid two and a half pages independently to his pen pal and did not want to stop.  I was so proud of him.  I truly believe that choice is an important motivator for students. 
While writing persuasive essays, the students worked on trying to persuade their parents to let them have a later bedtime.  Although the students were not given a choice on the topic, they were all eager to write.  The choice in this particular genre of writing was, what time they should stay up until and how they were going to persuade their parents.  The students were engaged in this writing activity because they felt strongly about it.  One of my students said that he would use flattery or reverse psychology to persuade his parents.  I was impressed with this terminology as this is a second grade student. 
I completely agree with the quote from the text.  It is an important aspect to consider when teaching writing.  It may seem minute, but in the end choice is a motivator for students. 

Sunday, February 13, 2011

Think Piece #3


Students are motivated in different ways.  Motivation for reading and other activities varies greatly from student to student.  Being aware of students’ literacy personalities can give you insight into how to motivate them. 
It is important to establish a purpose for reading.  I have many students ask me every week why are we reading this, why are we writing that, why do we have to do this?  Most teachers respond by telling the students because we have to, its part of the curriculum, the state/school says I have to teach it.  If we give students more practical reasons for whey they have to complete a task, they will most likely be more motivated to complete it.  Some students such as one in the study from the article, “What Motivates Students to Read,” is intrinsically motivated.  These students want to read and want to do well in school.  They put forth their best effort and do not need tangible motivators to complete assignments. 
Other students are motivated mostly by tangible rewards.  I have one student who is a struggling reader that needs daily tangible rewards to motivate him to read and participate in guided reading group.  This particular student does well utilizing strategies that he has learned to decode words and help to understand a story.  On his current instructional level, he is doing well.  If he is not interested in a particular topic of a book we are reading, he often times chooses to engage in avoidance behaviors.  I try to find books that will hold his attention, but that is not always possible.  He earns a small tangible reward on days that he is reading in an appropriate voice and participates in discussions about what we have read.  We have tried many different approaches with this student including non-tangible rewards, but the current plan in place has had the most success. 
I have noticed that students’ motivation to read changes as he or she grows and develops as a reader.  It is important to get to know your students not only as readers, but also as individuals.  Student backgrounds can play an important role in their level of engagement and enjoyment in reading as well as writing.  Providing various opportunities for reading, both structured and unstructured, is key.  Guided reading groups are important to teach students the skills necessary to learn and grow as readers.  To help build interest in reading, students need a time to read independently too.  I like the Daily 5 because it gives students choice in their reading.  The books students choose from are on their individual levels, but the key is that they choose the books.  They not only choose the books, but they also choose a spot to read in the room.  I have seen many students motivated to read by simply being given choice.    
Thinking back to my reading as a child, I was more motivated by the expectations of both my teachers and my parents to complete work.  Although I did not always like reading as a child, I did it when it was assigned because I was a student who followed directions and had much support at home.  As I got older, I began to like reading more and more.  My reading skills developed and so did my interest in reading.  By middle school I enjoyed reading when I was given choice.  This is when I went through my mystery phase and my favorite author was Agatha Christie.  I eventually grew out of that and began reading many different genres and authors.  To this day I still enjoy reading for pleasure.  When it comes to reading for assignments, I do it, but it stems back to my need to do my work as asked of by the teacher.  If students see their teachers reading or making connections to books they have read throughout the school day, they will have a positive role model for reading.   

Sunday, February 6, 2011

Think Piece #2


It is important to teach students strategies for writing: We teach students numerous strategies for reading from decoding strategies to fluency strategies to comprehension strategies.  I feel that we do not teach enough writing strategies and that it gets put on the back burner to reading.  I think that most teachers believe that by simply teaching the steps of writing, they are helping students become great writers.  After reading the article, “An Effective Framework for Primary Grad Guided Writing Instruction,” and Best Practices in Writing Instruction, I realized that there is more to writing than I thought.   All through college and in the world of teaching you are drilled about guided reading groups, but there is very little mention of guided writing groups.  
I feel that it is more difficult to assist students in writing instruction because you generally have less time than you have for reading.  You have limited time with each student.  In the class I push-into for writing, the students hands go up one after the other and it is difficult to get to all of the students.  Often times I am trying to keep students’ attention focused on the task of writing and not the actual writing procedure.  This takes away from time to assist in the actual writing process. 
It is important to give students the opportunity to share their writing.  Many teachers I work with give their students an opportunity to share their writing once a week.  Several students share each day.   This gives students the opportunity to hear about what others students are writing.  It also allows the student to hear his or her own writing and learn the importance of re-reading your work.  Many of my students have realized mistakes they have made as they are reading aloud when it does not sound right.    
I never thought of teaching writing similarly to a guided reading lesson.  This would be very beneficial to students, yet it comes down to finding the time in a day.  We are required to teach guided reading groups, yet not expected to teach guided writing groups.  There is usually only enough time to teach a whole group writing lesson everyday.  Just as it is important to provide a strong book introduction for students, it is also important to provide a strong introduction to guided writing.  In the article it states that composing is a skill that has to be learned just like spelling.  This helped put that idea into perspective for me.  I think that as teachers we sometimes make assumptions that just because we teach students the writing process, they automatically have the skills needed to compose a final piece. 
Chapter one of “Best Practices in Writing Instruction,” states that writing instruction must be integrated with the classroom instruction.  I enjoy pulling writing topics from read alouds and current units being worked on in class.  Students love the opportunity to respond to a story in writing.  Students will have a better understanding of a specific topic or skill if they have the opportunity to study in different ways. 
Students seem more motivated when they are given a choice about what they are going to write about.  They will generally put forth more effort if it is a topic that interests them.  Of course we have specific genres of writing that we are required to teach our students, but that doesn’t mean that we have to dictate what they write about.  Giving students that freedom to choose allows them to become more engaged in their writing and brings meaning to it. 
            After reading the article as well as Chapters 1 and 2, I feel that I have a new outlook on writing and the composing process.  I push-in to a classroom for writing so I do not make the plans, but there are many changes that I would like to make to my writing instruction if I was currently in a general education position instead of the special education position that I am in.